The Silent-Era Shostakovich

When prominent conductors visit New York for important engagements with local institutions, their schedules are usually very full. So it says good things about the priorities of the Russian maestro Vladimir Jurowski that while in New York to conduct a six-performance run of Strauss’s “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” at the Metropolitan Opera, he made time to work with the Juilliard Orchestra on an adventurous Shostakovich program. That concert took place on Monday at Alice Tully Hall, the night before Mr. Jurowski’s final “Frau” at the Met. The hall was packed.

At 41, the lanky Mr. Jurowski, the principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, did not seem much older than the college-age players in the orchestra. Choosing works from Shostakovich’s early years, including two rarities, was an apt idea. The main piece was the Symphony No. 1, completed in 1925, almost three months before this prodigy composer turned 19, and given its sensationally received premiere by the Leningrad Philharmonic the following year.

In the first half of the program, Mr. Jurowski and the Juilliard Orchestra performed suites from an early Shostakovich film score and the young composer’s lone venture into music hall entertainment. In 1924, Shostakovich obtained a job playing piano accompaniments for silent films, which were usually improvised on the spot or patched together beforehand. Though he learned from this work, he did not enjoy it.

But in 1928 he was asked to compose and orchestrate a full score for “The New Babylon,” a lengthy silent film set against the Paris Commune of 1871, following the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. The music, scored for a modest theater orchestra, was written to correlate closely with the film. Mr. Jurowski conducted music from three of the film’s 10 reels, substantial segments that totaled 35 minutes.

As was clear from this lively and brilliant performance, Shostakovich really cut loose his musical imagination in this piece. (He would eventually compose 37 film scores.) The excerpts opened with a satirical march at a pace too fast for troops of soldiers, with grating harmonies, fractured phrases and quick musical shifts. There are vividly orchestrated wrong-note waltzes, a blatantly sardonic riff on Offenbach’s well-known cancan, which turns frenetic, and some bleaker episodes with dark undertows, even when pummeling rhythms drive the music.

The music hall piece, “Hypothetically Murdered” Orchestral Suite, is a reconstruction by the composer and Shostakovich scholar Gerard McBurney. The music was written for an entertainment about a loafer named Stopka who, having shirked a compulsory civil defense exercise, is ordered to play a corpse in an air raid drill. Only Shostakovich’s piano sketches for the score have been found. But indications of orchestration are in the piano version, and Shostakovich later recycled numbers into various orchestral works.

Shostakovich’s First Symphony is a tour de force of precociousness. The first movement sounds as if instruments were trying out ideas and tentatively striking up a conversation. Soon, this busy movement is up and running, though there remains something coy and reserved about the music. The dazzling, brash scherzo that follows avoids the obvious by detouring into a weighty episode that could be some folkloric evocation of old Russia. The expansive slow movement transitions without pause into a restless, dark finale.

Mr. Jurowski drew a confident, glittering and rhapsodic performance of the symphony from the inspired Juilliard musicians. The students must have been thinking that the Shostakovich who wrote this work would only be a freshman if he were enrolled at Juilliard today.